Leg Day Observer: How to Lift
couple new Leg Day Observer columns on Inverse.com. First is a new year’s resolution story, part 1 in a how-to on getting started with strength training:
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/how-to-start-weight-lifting
Second, from the other week, is a (reported) meditation on what rest truly means… how it fits in to workouts, to life, what have you. is it an antipode to strength or does it build it? How much is too much…:
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/lifting-break-deload-week-explained
First article is a pretty meaty piece of perennial service journalism (if I say so myself), second is more specific. The resolution piece is part of a series that will go more in depth on the topic and will be published over the next few Saturdays. So if you are trying to become big and strong keep reading. Or if you don’t want to be but feel a hunger to know how the other half lives. As always, anyone interested in things I’ve touched on in any story — please email me if you’d like further reading recommendations, stuff pointed out, etc.
Newsletter extras… mainly a peccadillo touched on in both columns… in which the lack of emphasis in strength training literature about conditioning is an issue. Conditioning is incredibly important and limits workouts and strength. It is the bottleneck. (Conditioning, very roughly speaking, is your aerobic capacity, how much you can work out). Not enough conditioning means too much rest; it means strength plateaus, too. The ideal path to true strength (3x BW squat? IDK) feels like, roughly. a workout with substantial weights which feel heavy, done as fast as possible without legit form breakdowns. The speed is the difference. Conditioning can be ramped up with concentric exercises (drags, pulls, sturm und drangs) and sprints (runs, bikes), with sprints being the best (per a study), but both being good. It feels as important as keeping on a couple extra pounds. Maybe living in New York creates a natural disdain for hypertrophy; I am sure it does.
All things being equal a hyper-conditioned baseline is the best prep for an athlete to pivot into serious high weight powerlifting (or Strongman or Olympic… or shit, marathoning, why not). Is there a downside? I am sure at higher levels it affects incremental poundage — but if you are at that level and are looking to me for advice… don’t take mine. All anecdotal evidence I’ve run across(1) is that lifters with serious athletic/conditioning bonafides (Eddie Hall, Mattie Rogers) carry over that background into their lifting. Hall swam competitively for a while and is a talented powerlifter. Rogers, a former highly-ranked cheerleader (best in Florida for a while IIRC), might be the best Olympic lifter in America. All that strength and fitness allows her coaches to double-load her workouts to like, elite Russian/Bulgarian levels (i’m talking weekly poundages… haven’t checked in a while but they were insane a few years ago)… which just cannot be done unless you are in sprinter shape. That she works with weights is sort of ancillary to it all. Specialization comes after the baseline…
sound on! the narrator has a PhD from Stanford
The guy with the cool hair squatting above was able to become very strong because he was very fit to begin with. Or because he was very strong to begin with and was able to get very fit as he kept getting strong. Also I am sure his bones were set in the right way (see the first few chapters of Harry Crews’ BODY for a good discussion of this phenomenon)… of course, not every ex-swimmer, ex-lion tamer, ex cheerleader can segue well into another strength sport… in a world of millions of lifters there are thousands of exceptions… but all things being equal, they are better off… the nice thing about this path is the unity between strength and fitness/conditioning, which is not immediately obvious from research. Sometimes it feels like strength is the only way! Perhaps not always. But generally the harder, simpler way is best.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Other work: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-JLRt0Ec6gZBm50hATYCYmLctnF9GhVijoEbam50JSw/edit
(1) caveat emptor obviously…